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With a new single in the charts, an album on its way and a sell-out national
tour, Spiderbait are back. By Craig Mathieson.

It was always just Janet, Kram and Whitt. In dusty filing cabinets somewhere
there are documents with the names Janet English, Mark Maher and Damian Whitty
on them, but Spiderbait's music - and the story around their rise - was always
too egalitarian for the distance of surnames.

The great appeal of Spiderbait, particularly in the 1990s when their all-ages
shows were a rite of passage for a generation of teenagers, was that they never
separated themselves from their audience. They were just the three people in the
room who happened to be playing instruments.

At their shows, where the front of stage was a free-for-all of bodies
pinballing off each other, they would sometimes stop mid-song so Janet could
remind their larger and more uninhibited fans that knocking someone to the
ground, whether by accident or not, didn't make for an enjoyable gig. The roar
of approval that would follow, that sense of community given voice, was
something to hear.

Spiderbait embody an era in Australia music that only passed a handful of
years ago, but popular culture mutates at such a speed that there has been a
profusion of trends and movements - some for the better, many for the worse -
since.

But to paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, there are no second acts in rock 'n'
roll lives, but Spiderbait appear to be the exception.

This week their first single in three years, a pummelling cover of Huddie
Ledbetter's Black Betty (a one-hit wonder for Ram Jam back in 1977),
debuted on the national charts at number 12, a highpoint for a band who have
experienced no shortage of success. Their national tour, a return to smaller
venues where they made their name more than a decade ago, is all but sold-out. A
54-date tour with the Hoodoo Gurus will follow. Something is starting to
happen.

"Don't call it a comeback/I've been here for years," rapper LL Cool J once
declared. And as much as comeback is the "c" word no one wants to utter,
Spiderbait - older and quite possibly wiser - are experiencing one, rooted in
the musical subculture of the Melbourne they once lived in and the city they
have returned to after time away.

They may no longer get to gigs by loading their gear onto the 72 tram in
Camberwell, but Spiderbait have definitely come home.

For our interview two thirds of Spiderbait, Kram and Janet, are in a cafe in
Fitzroy. Fifty metres away, the Punters Club, a cornerstone of Melbourne's
musical heritage and once Kram's unofficial second home, has been turned into a
pizza restaurant, but their thoughts are with another of the city's
institutions, The Footy Show, on which the trio are scheduled to
perform Black Betty that night.

For Kram, the drummer, whose hands are dotted with dried red blisters, it is
also a chance to catch up with his friend Shane Crawford, the Hawthorn Football
Club captain who, like all three band members, hails from the NSW town of
Finley.

When Spiderbait played their one show in Finley - complete with raffle - at
the school hall in 2000, the AFL star was an enthusiastic stage-diver. For Kram,
whose two passions are music and sport, it's a reminder of the path he chose not
to travel. A promising junior footy player, he stopped playing for Finley in his
final year of high school because he couldn't risk damaging his hands when music
was one of his year 12 subjects. It was a choice that paid off, even if his
drive to write and play is no longer so frenetic.

"I do less and get more done now," Kram explains. "I no longer record
everything because I end up with 30 unfinished songs. You don't have to be
obsessive."

Was that change pointed out to you or was it learnt?

"It's something I had to learn," he replies, "because I don't really listen
to what anyone else says."

This draws a laugh from Janet, partly because it's true and also because
she's spent most of her adult life - all three members of Spiderbait are now in
their early to mid-30s - subtly making sure he did listen to what she had to
say. Kram is the most gregarious of the trio (if talking was a sport he would
represent Australia), but all three can be equally determined, even obstinate,
when it comes to making decisions about the band.

The rather involved internal dynamic between Janet, Whitt and Kram had its
beginnings in Finley, a town whose prevailing sporting culture would prove to be
great songwriting fuel for a disapproving Janet, although its true forging began
in Melbourne in the late '80s.

Spiderbait was formed in 1989 on the triangle of greenery opposite St Kilda's
Prince of Wales Hotel, where all three of them sat late one night, still high on
adrenalin after a show by American noiseniks Dinosaur Jr.

Whitt was already a guitarist, so Kram, who played drums as part of studying
music at Melbourne University, decided to teach Janet bass so they could all
play together.

Having grown up on the pop hits of regional AM radio, they were energised by
discovering punk rock. They soaked up 12 years of glorious noise in a few months
and then began to perform at house parties where ramshackle instruments were
passed back and forth.

In the years before the phrase "alternative" became a marketing tool,
commercial expectations were not high for an independent group. "The most you
could hope for was to tour for nine months of the year and maybe get to Prague
and earn enough to pay your rent," recalls Kram. "Two or three years later you
could make money and have a career. It all changed very quickly."

The mid 1990s was a goldrush for the unlikely wave of artists propelled into
the mainstream by Nirvana's influence. Every show, every new release, promised
something exciting. A bunch of 14-year-old boys from Newcastle - silverchair -
sold 3 million copies of their debut album. Many people found a degree of
success they would once have considered ludicrous.

The Spiderbait I met in 1995 were caught up in these heady days. After a
series of releases on Melbourne's Au-go-go record label, now defunct but then
one of the country's great independent labels, they had moved to corporate,
major-label climes.

Spiderbait were not meant to get even this far. The group had almost
foundered several times due to a succession of conflicting relationships among
the trio, a part of their development they now consign to ancient history and
have stopped discussing. But they survived, even prospered. They played live
with an unparalleled intuitive sense, and their recorded work showed clarity and
a unique identity. Their second album, 1995's The Unfinished Spanish Galleon
of Finley Lake, would sell 50,000 copies, and 1996's Ivy and the
Big Apples moved more than 170,000.

"We worked very hard," says Janet. "You do miss out on things you shouldn't.
I've missed family funerals that I really didn't want to, or you come back to
find that your friends' kids are growing up."

Never one for hipster poses, Spiderbait have always been openly grateful for
the career their music gave them - "otherwise we would have had to get jobs,"
jokes Kram - but nevertheless the freedom success gave them eventually started
to crack the foundation they'd laid.

Spiderbait's sixth album, the imminent Tonight Alright, was born in
a North Melbourne house last winter.

Every day around noon, Janet and Kram would ride their bikes, from Fitzroy
and North Carlton respectively, to Whitt's, where they would write and demo
songs in his home studio. Some of the best ideas would come about 5pm, when the
setting sun would reflect off the building opposite and warm both the room and
their compositions.

It was the first time in years all three of them had lived in Melbourne.
After Ivy, Whitt and then Kram had moved to Byron Bay, while Janet relocated to
Brisbane. Simply rehearsing, as they discovered, meant flying interstate.

"It didn't affect our friendship but it fractured us creatively," notes Kram.
"Each person was working on what they do by themselves and then passing it
on."

During this period they made a pair of albums that expanded on Spiderbait's
aesthetic of precision riffing offset by power-pop charm: 1999's Grand
Slam was a piece of intricate production, recorded at length in Sydney,
with Kram in the midst of his "Brian Wilson phase"; and 2001's The Flight of
Wally Funk was altogether looser, a party in the studio where sonically
anything went.

"Having all three of us back in Melbourne was a great aid to making this
album," Janet says, and their physical closeness extended to their philosophical
approach. They agreed up front that they wanted to make a record focused on
guitar, bass and drums. The loops and keyboards that had become part of the
recording process on previous discs were to be put aside.

That attitude, and a stack of demos, won over American producer Sylvia Massy
Shivy, who'd previously played engineer for Prince and Tool. The group relocated
to her studio, a converted 1920s movie theatre just past a convenience store
with a neon "24 Hour Ammo & Liquor" sign in the small Californian mountain
town of Weed.

Before making the album, Shivy had never heard of Spiderbait, but they came
to appreciate her lack of baggage. She had fresh ears and the three of them were
happy to cede some control. "We let our guard down a little bit, we let other
people get involved," says Kram, who even chose to hear finished mixes of songs
via e-mailed MP3 files instead of sitting in on the sessions.

"That sure beats you listening to the snare over and over again," sighs
Janet.

Tonight Alright arrives at a commercial juncture in Spiderbait's
career. A graph that peaked with Ivy would show Grand Slam at
about 80,000 copies and Wally Funk at just 20,000. While with hindsight
they wouldn't change either album to tempt the retail gods, nor are they
diffident enough to pretend that increasingly failing to connect with their
audience didn't plant the seeds of self-doubt and disappointment.

According to Janet, the best barometer of your career remains your parents.
"You get comments like, `Well, you've had a good run,' " she says. "That's a
worrisome sign."

Kram adds: "The good thing about having a few records that don't do as well
as you want is that after you get through the disappointment, you move on and
you stop worrying about that shit. When something good does happen you
appreciate it again."

That sense of renewal - with their music, with new fans, with Melbourne
itself - will serve Spiderbait well. But, more importantly, they've remained
true to the qualities they've carried since the night they formed. Sincerity is
an oft-derided element in a band but in this instance it matters. It was always
just Janet, Kram and Whitt. And it still is.

Tonight Alright is out on Sunday.

Journalist Craig Mathieson has written two books on Spiderbait and the
Australian alternative music scene: Hi-Fi Days (1996) and The Sell-In
(2000).